I think that salvaged laptops make lousy picture frames. They run hot, draw an unconscionable amount of power, their power supplies tend to be the first thing to go, and they contain moving parts. The more-awesome way to build this gizmo would be to port DriftNet to a jailbroken AppleTV, or to one of those wallwart-computer dinguses. See also Newstweek.

The dilemma: I need to play live to have a real connection to an audience but the expense of touring is debilitating.

My solution: Pre-sell the shows before they are even booked. Get the fans as invested as I am in the creation of the art. [...]

There is no "Making It" or rather, this is making it. Right here, where I am, with my small but dedicated fan base holding me aloft while I drift through the detritus of an imploding music industry that never did a thing for me yet still manages to get in my way. I'm a modern musician with modern tools trying to navigate an old broken system; a system which declared that all musicians must work for free until picked up by a record label which would either make or destroy them; a system which drove a wedge between fans and their music, musicians and their audiences; a system that forgot that the entire reason it existed was to facilitate the experience of art.

This kind of thing works out nicely from the venue's point of view, too. The absolute hardest thing about booking live music is knowing whether anyone's going to show up. Without a reasonable guess as to how many people will show, both the performer and the venue are risking a lot of money.

"Make an educated guess about how many people will show, for this band you've never heard of in a genre you're only passingly familiar with" is pretty much the entire job of a venue's booker (or "talent buyer"). It's a black art. Anything that takes the guesswork out of that is better for everyone.

A state agency has told New York's animal cemeteries to stop burying the ashes of pet owners alongside their beloved cats, dogs and parakeets. The order from New York's Division of Cemeteries comes as a growing number of Americans are deciding to share their final resting place with their pets.

Ryan's wife, Bunny, and their two dogs, B.J. I and B.J. II, are buried at Hartsdale. Ryan had arranged, and prepaid, to join them, York said. There's also a space for B.J. III, who's still alive. But Ryan's ashes sit in a wooden box at his sister's home because the state's new rule won't allow him into Hartsdale.

Someone's gonna need to diagram that sentence for me. Is that "wife AND bunny", "wife NAMED Bunny", or "wife WHO IS A bunny"? Because I understand that sort of thing is possible now that we're no longer defending traditional marriage.

An airship burst into flames and fell out of the sky in Germany on Sunday evening, killing the pilot, but the three passengers managed to leap to safety and were unhurt, police said.

Bild newspaper reported that the pilot, an Australian, called out to the passengers: "We're having a crash!" and told them to jump out of the cabin, which was hovering just 2 meters above the ground at the time. As soon as they had hurled themselves to safety, the airship soared rapidly to a height of around 50 meters, possibly due to the sudden loss of weight in the cabin, making it impossible for the pilot to escape, eyewitnesses said.

The blimp then became engulfed in flames and fell back to the ground in a ball of fire.

New hack: "Munge Videos.scpt". Well, it's not actually that new, but I haven't published it before, and it has grown a lot lately.

It's an iTunes AppleScript to process newly-imported music videos. Among other things, it: marks the track as being a "Music Video"; sets the "Comments" field to the resolution in pixels of the video; sets the "Volume Adjustment" based on the video's overall audio volume; copies the year, genre, rating, and capitalization from older versions of this same track; and adds this new track to all of the playlists of an old track that it appears to be intended to replace.

It's pretty hairy, and it's a really good reason to hate AppleScript. I'd appreciate code critiques from anyone who thinks they actually understand this bagbiting language.

PS: If anyone can tell me how to add a track to a playlist at a particular position, e.g., "add track B after track A in playlist X", that would be swell.